Meet Mark

Let me introduce myself. My name is Mark Sisson. I’m 63 years young. I live and work in Malibu, California. In a past life I was a professional marathoner and triathlete. Now my life goal is to help 100 million people get healthy. I started this blog in 2006 to empower people to take full responsibility for their own health and enjoyment of life by investigating, discussing, and critically rethinking everything we’ve assumed to be true about health and wellness...

Tag: Big Pharma

By Mark Sisson | December 27, 2017

A few months back, I put together an article on alternative therapies for depression. Many readers showed a lot of interest in some of the emerging non-drug treatments in that field, and, more importantly, many began to relay their own stories about how they overcame or successfully managed their depression through various strategies. That’s what I love the most about this community—sharing experience and expertise in the interest of broadening available solutions beyond what conventional thought tells us.

I’ve received frequent requests over the years to do the same for the convoluted world of ADD and ADHD treatment. There’s a lot to this picture and (if there’s interest) probably fodder for a follow-up post. For today I’ll delve into some of the lifestyle strategies and alternative therapies that offer the most promise.

By Mark Sisson | July 26, 2017

My friend, former co-competitor, business partner, and writing buddy Brad Kearns had been on a “Quantified Self” kick, tracking biomarkers, testing blood sugar and ketone levels, and staying abreast of all the various ways we can quantitatively check our progress. He’s months into a ketogenic experiment and had hoped to marry his subjective impressions to objective measurements to strengthen his intuition and improve his results.

By Mark Sisson | July 03, 2017

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering three questions. First, is HDL all it’s cracked up to be? Is HDL always good? Is it the savior? Or is the story a bit more complicated? Next, what are some good probiotic options for treating acne? Do any exist? And last but not least, what’s the relationship of artificial sweeteners, insulin, appetite, and weight gain?

By Mark Sisson | March 27, 2017

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering one question. It’s a good one. A reader (many, actually) wrote in to get my opinion on the latest blockbuster cholesterol-lowering drug. A new study appears to show that the drug in question—Repatha—reduced LDL to unprecedented levels and protected patients against the primary cardiovascular disease endpoints they were measuring. What does it all mean? Should we all start taking Repatha?

By Mark Sisson | March 16, 2017

As a Primal lifer, I recognize that purity has a certain allure, just as I know it has its decided limitations. I frequently find myself wondering, “Would my paleolithic forebears have done/said/eaten that?” and choosing my course of action based on this line of educated assumption. It’s the WWGD lens on modern living. In a Primal-perfect world, that would be sufficient to ensure continued health and happiness. But things don’t always work out as planned…

Let’s say you hurt your back in an unfortunate turn of events. Primal dictates can certainly help with healing you over the long term, but if you want to get out of bed in the morning you’re likely stuck with the doc’s prescriptions. Similar situation if you’ve suffered physical damage to your eyesight, hearing, brain, or any number of your less robust anatomical sectors. Sometimes to get life done, you’ve just got to suck it up and take your meds.

It’s possible, however, that this may soon change. In my recent post on the vagus nerve, I touched upon an emerging curiosity in the medical world: electroceuticals. While still in comparative infancy, electroceuticals may end up revolutionizing a health care model currently dominated by the drug industry.

By Mark Sisson | November 22, 2016

I’m not a drug denier. For the most part, at the base level, pharmaceuticals do what they’re supposed to do. Statins lower cholesterol. Beta-blockers lower blood pressure. Antibiotics kill bacteria. Whether those changes save lives or reverse disease is another question entirely. But we can all agree that pharmaceuticals deserve a place in modern medicine. And even if we don’t, they objectively have a place, and we must acknowledge reality.

We can also agree that many of the most common prescription drugs affect the way we absorb, metabolize, utilize, and excrete vitamins, minerals, and other important health co-factors. People taking them deserve nutritional counseling. This is my quick and dirty attempt to encourage that.

By Mark Sisson | December 17, 2015

Long before humans interacted with the numinous through intermediaries and holy books, we experienced it in other ways. All night drumming and dancing sessions, extended fasts, exposure to extreme temperatures, steam lodges, and week-long wilderness forays, and other rituals have all been used to produce visions and transcend normal waking consciousness. There’s even a theory that early Christian baptisms were actually simulated drownings that produced near-death experiences and the direct sensation of being in the presence of a higher power.

But perhaps the oldest, most reliable way to directly experience the divine is through the use of psychedelics.

By Mark Sisson | December 01, 2015

The future prospects of antibiotics look grim. Headline after headline proclaims the mounting resistance to antibiotics among pathogenic bacteria and the impending inefficacy of our best drugs to fight them. Antibiotic-resistant “pig MRSA” has been documented moving from pigs to people in several countries, including Denmark and Holland. That same MRSA has also been found in the US, England, and is likely brewing wherever pigs and other animals are intensively raised. And just recently, researchers discovered that MCR-1, the gene responsible for resistance to the “last line of defense” antibiotic—polymixin, the one we use when everything else has failed—is transferable between different strains of E. coli. Formerly relegated to pigs, E. coli and K. pneumoniae bacteria with the MCR-1 mutation have appeared in human subjects in several Chinese hospitals. Transferring the gene between different bacterial species is theoretically harder, but that it’s possible at all has raised alarms in the scientific community.

By Mark Sisson | July 29, 2014

Although statins get a lot of flak in the Primal health community, you have to hand it to them. They may not cure cancer, or single-handedly save the economy and bring back all the jobs, or render entire populations totally immune to cardiovascular disease, but they do exactly what they’re meant to do: lower cholesterol. And they’re very good at what they do. You want lower LDL without changing what you eat or how much you exercise, or trying that crazy meditation stuff? Take a statin. Do you want to hit the target lipid numbers to lower your insurance premium? Take a statin.

Except that statins lower cholesterol by inhibiting HMG-CoA reductase, a crucial enzyme located upstream on the cholesterol synthesis pathway. If that were all HMG-CoA reductase did for us, that’s one thing. At least we’d know what we were getting ourselves into when we filled the prescription. But the “cholesterol pathway” isn’t isolated. Many other things happen along and branch off from the same pathway.

By Mark Sisson | July 10, 2014

It’s a common refrain that living healthily costs an arm and a leg. The food bills, in particular, garner the biggest sighs and frustration: the price of pastured meats, eggs (and dairy for those who partake), of wild-caught fish, of organic this and that, of healthier nuts and nut butters, of just about any whole food. For some folks that doesn’t take into account the extra travel schlepping from place to place. Shopping for healthy food can be a long-range foraging expedition in some parts. Internet suppliers can help, but they don’t cover all the bases. The time, expense, and inconvenience of healthy food shopping (and preparation) add up, and some days we can wonder if it’s worth all the trouble. What if we just gave in? Gave up? What if we went back to buying the typical processed food products that seem to colonize nine-tenths of the country? Just think of the convenience – and the savings? Seriously, what would we do with all that money? For a while, it might seem like a financial boon. Over time, however, I think we’d be looking at another story.